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Dessert

Milk Icing

Milk icing is a sugar and milk mixture thickened by boiling and beating, used as a cake frosting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Milk Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Heat the milk and sugar together until the sugar is dissolved.

  2. Boil gently until it thickens and forms a rope when dripped from a spoon.

Finish and spread

  1. Remove from heat and beat until it thickens and drops from the spoon.

  2. Quickly spread on cake.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, as it cooks, body that thickens the icing as it boils.
Milk
Dissolves the sugar and provides the liquid that cooks down into a thick, spreadable syrup.

The step that matters

Beating until the icing thickens. Sugar syrup thickens as it cools and is agitated, so beating off the heat lets it set into a spreadable icing. Spreading too late can leave it stiff and hard to work with, so it should be spread quickly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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